Puritanism makes you a hard working robot that dislikes the other robots, and maybe your own ‘bot:
Matthew Hutson, Are Americans Still Puritan? – NYTimes.com
Protestant attitudes about work may also influence how Americans treat their co-workers. Calvin argued that socializing while on the job was a distraction from the assignment God gave you. The psychologist Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks has found that Protestants — but not Catholics — become less sensitive to others’ emotions when reminded of work, possibly indicating a tendency to judge fraternizing as unproductive and unprofessional. He and collaborators have also found that Americans have a culturally specific tendency to view family photos and other personal items as unprofessional presences in the office.
Not all of the legacy of Puritanism suggests moral uprightness. Studies since the ’70s have also found that Americans who score high on a Protestant Ethic Scale (emphasizing self-reliance and self-discipline) or similar metric show marked prejudice against racial minorities and the poor; hostility toward social welfare efforts; and, among obese women, self-denigration.
This is, in part, why I began to think of a Neo-Calvinism based on the comic Calvin & Hobbes (by Waterson) when trying to reconcile the study of games with the value systems of the academy. Work and play are held to be in contrast with one another, mutually exclusive, in Calvinism. Fun is suspect. Value is found in being an ant, not a grasshopper, metaphorically speaking. The idea of rigor in the academy is joyless. How then is one to apply the concept of rigor to the joyful? the playful? the gameful?
The atmosphere in the classroom, even in the art classroom, is idealized as one of workmanlike concentration. How can one study fun without killing fun?
I propose that one has to change the terms, that one has to have a playful environment, and one that encourages reflective play.